Song: Love Lives Beyond the Tomb

Song: Love Lives Beyond the Tomb Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

First-person limited. Unlike a traditional love poem, the speaker is not recounting an experience of love for an individual person, but rather attempting to figure out the nature of love, and expressing his love for love itself.

Form and Meter

Four-line stanzas alternating between short lines of approximately 4 syllables and long lines of approximately 8 syllables. Each stanza rhymes ABAB.

Metaphors and Similes

In line 2, Clare uses simile to compare the earth's fading to dew. The simile stresses that things in this world are temporary while establishing dew as a symbol of ephemerality.

Alliteration and Assonance

Line 1, 5, and 21, alliteration of /l/, "love lives."
Line 6, alliteration of /h/, "happiness of healthy"

Irony

Ironically, though the poem praises lovers, the speaker experiences love at one remove. Rather than falling in love himself, he celebrates other lovers who are "faithful, fond and true."

Genre

Love poetry, religious poetry

Setting

The natural world, the countryside

Tone

Reflective

Protagonist and Antagonist

N/A

Major Conflict

The major conflict is between limits and limitlessness. In the first two stanzas, Clare casts love as the limitless alternative to the mortal world. However, in the next three stanzas, he suggests that love can't be fully separated from that world, and that it is in the world of natural things that we most frequently encounter love.

Climax

The climax of the poem occurs in the fifth stanza, where Clare asserts that there is no better voice for love than finite nature.

Foreshadowing

N/A

Understatement

N/A

Allusions

Line 7, "Eve's dews may weep," likely alludes to the Christian story of creation and Adam and Eve's loss of paradise. Dew, a symbol of mortality, is a product of Eve's disobedience, which led to humankind being exiled from the garden of Eden.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

In line 10, Clare uses "hours" metonymically, to stand in for those months of the year when the world is green.

Personification

Clare personifies love as a living thing throughout the poem. He is adapting the Christian tradition of using love interchangeably with the person of God.

In the fifth stanza, Clare personifies nature. He describes the wind as its voice, and writes that through it, nature gives voice to love.

Hyperbole

N/A

Onomatopoeia

N/A

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